Outworld Alliance planetary populations?

[Korzon77]

Here's a question-- will there ever be any sort of update of the OA's populations?  Looking at the sourcebooks, it seems that Remora is listed of having a population of 70,000, and yet has industrial concerns on the world that produce everything from full up fighters to AC-10's.  I'm just assuming there's a typo somewhere given that 70,000 is smaller than my hometown, and less than some RW production centers.

[HABeas2]

Hello,

If you think that's bad, look at the data on Hesperus II!

Thank you,

- Herbert Beas
  BattleTech
  Catalyst Game Labs

[cray]

Hesperus II and Remora both have reasonable populations for dedicated factory towns who depend on imported...well, almost everything other than 'Mech parts.

And when you get down to it, BattleMechs can be put together in field conditions or a DropShip's 'Mech bay by a couple of techs if you have all the parts built elsewhere. That's how Solaris VII arena teams and pirates get away with building 'Mechs with such small numbers.

Big populations in the billions are what you need to reasonably cover every bit of a complex industrial base, but those billions don't have to be on one planet (or even, as pirate 'Mechs demonstrate, in one nation) when you have JumpShips to link them.

[HABeas2]

Hello,

Heh. Right. Or we can just admit that we're not quite sure what happened there and move on...

To answer the question, we actually are rather careful about we retcon/revise these days, and the matter of planetary populations has been looked at internally (and resolved). So while you are not likely to see a fix that's backdated to all previous products on the matter (meaning somehow Hesperus and Remora have insane amounts of automation), you will likely see other fixes over the years ahead....

Thank you,

- Herbert Beas
  BattleTech
  Catalyst Game Labs